Matt Kaplan in Undark Magazine:
It was June of 1775 and the British army was in control of Boston. George Washington had only recently become the commander of the colonial army and, while he had not fought at Bunker Hill, he arrived there shortly thereafter. He and his soldiers hid in the woodlands around the city watching and waiting for an opportunity to take Boston back. There were several problems with that plan, though. First, Washington did not have the weapons on hand for a siege. Second, even if the weapons had been available, they wouldn’t have done him much good since he didn’t have enough troops to actually lay siege. Yet both of these problems paled in comparison to the third. There was a smallpox outbreak in the city.
More here.
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This April marks the quadricentenary of Bacon’s death, the man who, though his own scientific innovations were middling, was arguably the philosopher most responsible for championing the empirical technocracy that our world has largely become. “I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in,” Bacon wrote in his 1620 Novum Organum, “starting directly from the simple sensuous perception.” Bacon’s method was inductive, the careful tabulation of observation and experiment, the methodical calculation of possibility and the invention of models to describe nature, the models themselves ever-contingent and shifting based on the reception of new and better data.
The San Francisco technology company Anthrophic announced Tuesday that it wasn’t releasing a new version of its Claude AI super-brain — because it is so powerful that it has the ability to hack into just about any computer system, no matter how secure, in a matter of days if not hours.
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Friedrich Nietzsche said a great deal about himself. He was the self-styled ‘Antichrist’, the herald of the ‘death of God’, a thinker who prided himself on disclosing the ‘human, all-too-human’ origins of morality, the soul and religious belief. He despised Platonism, regarded himself as history’s most formidable opponent of Christianity, and often wrote with a fiercely materialist agenda. Given these credentials, Nietzsche appears to be one of the least likely figures to merit the title ‘mystic’. But he was precisely that.
We came in just before sunup and heard the plastic plant had to be shut down for emergency repair. The foreman drove us to the control house and then went in to talk specifics with the unit operator. We three mechanics remained in the work truck, cellphones lighting up our faces.
A single shot transforms the mice’s brains into biomanufacturing machines. Blood proteins churn the injected chemicals into a soft, flexible electrode mesh that seamlessly wraps around delicate neurons. Pulses of light aimed at the mesh quiet hyperactive cells. All the while, the mice go about their merry ways, with no inkling they’ve been turned into cyborgs.